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Thursday, 17 May 2012

Thing 3 Consider your personal brand


... or oi gov, it wasn't me!
Thing 3 looked at personal branding and provided a number of resources to investigate. 

As suggested I carried out a search for my name on a search engine (bing)– 10,700 results. The first was for facebook (not me) , a couple of linkedins (none me), Cheryl kent the photographer (not me) and Cheryl kent the author (not me), then a whole series of obituaries (well, you know). I didn’t make an appearance until the end of page 3 where my Scoop it subject came up and a photo of mine from the floods in Doncaster. Limiting to UK only pushed my hits up the listing and included my contact info on Hslid and Keele university. Also tried a search including library and librarian and got similar results. You also seem to get lots of hits from the Daily Mail - Cheryl who comments on stories (not me) and hits about Cheryl Cole (so not me).

Thinking about what I do online made me realise that I must have quite a fractured profile (brand?). Because so many things are “shareable” you end up creating an online profile without realising it.

What is my goal? Well, it depends on what product I’m using and what I’m using it for. I tend to focus on what is achievable with the immediate product rather than whether I have an overall online goal. I’m experimenting with this blog as part of the cpd23 course. I’m not sure that I would continue using it past that. My use of some other tools will be different whether for professional reasons linked to my current job (eg twitter), or whether with a longer term professional outlook (eg linked in) or whether from a personal perspective (facebook). Of course these inter-link in many ways. Over time I’ve used products and dropped them as I’ve moved on, so no doubt there is quite a breadcrumb trail.

My online presence is a bit all over the place - not sure if I can pull it together to create a brand.


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